This invention relates to safety gloves such as those worn by meat cutters.
Such gloves should be strong enough to prevent accidental injury to the wearer from knives and other meat cutting instruments. They should also resist absorption of fluids such as blood which could harbor bacteria, be able to withstand sterilizing temperatures, and avoid loose gathers or folds which could catch on machinery or otherwise interfere with work.
The gloves are made from a mesh of interlocking metal rings, typically bronze or stainless steel. Such meshes, and various methods of making them, have long been known in the art. See, for example, expired U.S. Pat. Nos. 948,615, 1,028,904. Because a wearer's hand is considerably larger in circumference than his wrist, and because also the interlocking ring construction does not permit the mesh to expand, existing mesh gloves include a side opening that extends from the wrist to near the base of the little finger. This side opening allows to glove to open and permits insertion of the user's hand. The glove is then held in place by a strap stitched to the end of the glove and buckled around the user's wrist.
This long-existing glove construction has several disadvantages. The side opening must be relatively long to permit the wearer's hand to be inserted; but a side opening is unsafe because it leaves a portion of the wearer's hand unprotected even when the glove is buckled in place. Further, the straps on such gloves easily become contaminated, rendering the glove unsanitary and therefore unfit for use in a meat cutting plant; yet because the strap must be stitched to the glove to draw the loose mesh on either side of the opening together and hold the glove in place, the strap cannot easily be replaced, and the entire glove often must be thrown away or returned to the manufacturer for a new strap long before any of the metal mesh has worn.